The development process is an iterative process riddled with more snakes than ladders. But maintaining your standards matters more when you’re a stakeholder in the solution’s success. You care because it’s yours. So, why do so many independent software vendors (ISV) outsource to external providers? This month’s blog considers a few reasons – and adds a few more…
Hurray! It’s Monday and your team is busy. It’s a nice brief, and you’re comfortable that you can deliver everything you promised at the agreed deadline and to budget.
Whether your client is going to use the new application, software, or system themselves to streamline workflows, tweak their processes or sell the solution on to their customer, you’re all set.
Then, something happens.
Your sales team (if you have one) has won more work. Or a client contacts you themselves with a burning need that you’re going to meet. Maybe both. As a smaller company, you’re not turning anything down right now. But there’s a lot of heavy lifting involved.
Once the requirements are gathered and the brief agreed upon, the job moves from the theoretical, whiteboard existence to the more prosaic, nuts-and-bolts level. Multiple lifecycles of planning, creating, testing, and deploying different products is painstaking work and except for some automation, offers very few shortcuts.
Get it wrong and you burn down time in testing, bug-fixing, and remedial work. When it’s (fingers crossed) done well, the quality’s better, your customers are happier, and your brand is enhanced – especially important for an ISV entrusting its reputation to an outside supplier. Great. So, who does the work?
Give it to your guys
You rely on a small team that’s right-sized for your company – an uneven workload makes it strategically prudent to run a limited resource only. But then you lose a key team member at a crucial time, through planned absence or sickness (these things happen). And that extra job suddenly hits. Bandwidth has been reached.
What guys?
Perhaps you don’t have a development team at all. As a start-up, you may not have the need, or resources to add more to the payroll at this stage. Maybe you don’t have the expertise to recruit for such a specialist role – you’re fully focused on whatever it is you do best.
If you don’t have a go-to outsourcing option for coding and development work then you must either do it yourselves, somehow, risk your reputation by farming it out to an unknown quantity, hope it goes well, and that you don’t win anymore work. (Who does that?)
Alternatively, you can defer to a skilled, experienced and UK-based dev team.
Meet Purple Crane
As well as having a growing and loyal roster of clients, we are the go-to outsourcing partner for many more, including tech firms who know good code from bad. Development is what we do – some of it, anyway. Our outsourcing response is a full-fat, service-first offering which means you can give us the problem, and we come back with the solution. Sometimes literally. Here’s what you get.
- Project-based development or ad hoc support
- Experienced senior developers
- Understanding of corporate development
- Fixed fees to help keep you on budget
- Reliable and high-quality delivery
At least half of our work is for companies offering the software we build for them as a service to their customers. They rely on our company to deliver their brand promise. These customers spare themselves the expense and potential hassle of a dev shop and, instead, focus on the next job.
If Purple Crane can help deliver it, we should talk.
